University of Texas Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO) Holdings
(as of July 18, 2010)
Updated with the most recent financial disclosure forms, as of Feb. 28, 2010.
The University of Texas Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO) is the primary investment arm of the University of Texas System, and as of July 2010, it managed more than $22 billion in endowments and operational funds for the University of Texas and Texas A&M Systems. It is a public fund, but it has lately operated under significant secrecy, sheltering disclosures by investing in private equity and hedge funds that do not, in turn, disclose their investments.
In the late 1990s, scandal plagued UTIMCO at the helm of Tom Hicks, who was the first chairman of UTIMCO after it was created by then-governor George W. Bush. Many of UTIMCO's investments, which then lacked the modest transparency it has now, were found to be directed to Republican coffers and Hicks' business associates by in investigation by The Houston Chronicle. Hicks later stepped down, and UTIMCO began releasing a detailed schedule of investments for the Permanent University Fund (PUF), which is the main endowment fund for the UT System.
Today, detailed schedules of the investments in the PUF can be found online per a mandate by the UT System Board of Regents: An archive can be found at UTIMCO's Web site.
However, more than half of UTIMCO's investments are located in other funds, which means that UTIMCO has a habit of publicly disclosing less than half of its investments. In 2007, I submitted an open records request for the detailed schedule of investments for the General Endowment Fund (GEF) and the Intermediate Term Fund (ITF), which make up most of the rest of UTIMCO's endowments.
Initially, UTIMCO rebuffed my request, but I finally received these schedules of investments. Those detailed schedules have scant information about the billions that UTIMCO has invested in alternative market funds, such as hedge funds and private equity firms. So I compiled another request for this information. I try to repeat these requests yearly to keep a public record of UTIMCO's holdings, the last of which was on June 3, 2010, which produced documents dated February 28, 2010.
(These document downloads require Adobe Acrobat Reader or any PDF viewer.)
Detailed schedule of UTIMCO investments
These documents provide a detailed snapshot of UTIMCO's investments in its four main funds.
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Private Equity Funds throughout UTIMCO history
These documents provide detailed information about UTIMCO's private equity investments since 1996, including the key principles in many private equity and hedge funds:
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Currently held UTIMCO Private Equity Funds
These documents detail UTIMCO's currently held private equity investments:
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Private Equity Funds that have cashed out
UTIMCO also released details on Private Equity Funds that had been cashed out, ending UTIMCO's investment in them, and how much they returned. Most returns have been quite good, but some investments have crapped out. In 2004, UTIMCO turned over $374,000 to Tejas Venture Management, a software venture capital fund. Soon thereafter, it appears that the money completely vanished.
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UTIMCO Private Equity Funds talking points
This is a one-page memo that served as a talking point to justify UTIMCO's investment in these often-risky funds that is typically included with their documents:
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Hedge Funds and amounts held by UTIMCOAfter another round of prodding, UTIMCO finally released detailed information about their hedge fund investments. This is a schedule of those investments as of March 31, 2007. |
Compact schedule of UTIMCO's alternative investments
Finally, UTIMCO released a compact, one-page list of their investments in some select hedge funds and private equity firms (they refer to both of these funds as "alternative investments"), as of December 31, 2006. This does not include all such investments, but is extremely useful in tracking down the key principal(s) that manage these (as of now) unregulated funds. |
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